I don’t know what I had in mind when I started this month of blogging every day about what we do for homeschooling. But it wasn’t this. I’m completely bored, and we’re only on day four. The first year of homeschooling, I wrote every day about what we were doing, and it was helpful to [Read More…]

Our house was abuzz with activity today. Kids working on final edits to a folktale. Other kids trying to rescue a snow redoubt in the backyard from the never ending rain and warm temperatures. Pokemon upstairs. YouTube videos downstairs. Kids feeding the dog, or playing with the dog, or letting the dog out the door [Read More…]

I don’t feel any need to protect Christmas. God doesn’t need my protection. And the truth is that I have more sympathy for the Puritan understanding of Christmas than I do for what most modern Christians do to celebrate the day .But I do want to protect my ability to celebrate my faith and raise my children as Christians. And I find myself wanting to discuss it all with Sarah Palin, who just wrote Good Tidings, Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas.[Read more…]

Maybe most of us make art in response to loss. Roadside memorials, video montages, elaborate masses with incense and organ music, and tattoos like those that sprang up all over town after the Boston bombings. Our family responded with Halloween costumes. Boston Strong! [Read more…]

We homeschoolers spend so much time defending ourselves from people who think we are nuts, or selfish, or ill-informed that we tend to take ourselves too seriously. We should remedy that with lots of self-deprecating jokes, don’t you think? [Read more…]

When I was having a hard time convincing my boys to quit jumping on the couches, it never occurred to me to pay a dog trainer two hundred dollars an hour to help me out. Maybe I should have, because what I have learned from our trainer in the last year has been worth far [Read More…]

For everyone who wants to say that George Washington was the most honorable man our country has ever known, there is a ghost crying out for justice. For everyone who demands that we see him only as an oppressor whose fight for “liberty for all” was a mockery, there is are decisions he made regarding slavery that required more strength than most of us will ever show about anything. Liberty demands justice, but it’s meaningless without mercy. [Read more…]